News and updates related to Composition Forum

The editors of Composition Forum are pleased to announce a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Public Writing in Composition guest edited by Christopher Minnix. Please send 300 to 500 word proposals for articles and Program Profiles by September 15, 2016 to Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu). See below for a complete timeline.

Twentyyears ago Susan Wells introduced us to the story of Arthur Colbert—a Temple University student who crafted a powerful and effective public response to being falsely accused, detained, and beaten by two Philadelphia policemen—in the introduction to her seminal article “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?” Writing six years after Wells, Christian Weisser predicted that public writing could become “the next dominant focal point around which the teaching of college writing is theorized and imagined” (42) in Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Over the past twenty years, public writing has indeed become a major focus in composition and a major initiative in many composition programs. At the same time, rereading Arthur Colbert’s story in our contemporary moment, a moment marked by significant police brutality but also by powerful and savvy rhetorical responses, such as we see from movements like #BlackLivesMatter and Dreamers Adrift, underlines the continued importance of teaching public writing, while returning us to the perennial question articulated by Wells: “what do we want from public writing?”

This special issue of Composition Forum calls on public writing teachers to respond to this question in our current disciplinary and political moment. The editor invites work that examines and explores critical issues in the theory and teaching of public writing within the discipline of composition studies, but also invites studies that examine how contemporary public discourse, such as the rhetoric of social movements, collective activism, or advocacy, might shed new light on enduring controversies in public writing research and provide new theoretical and pedagogical approaches to teaching public writing.

Research on public writing has theorized and critiqued understandings of the classroom as public space, debated the authenticity of public writing assignments and genres, theorized and outlined multimodal public writing pedagogies, developed the use of rhetorical case studies of public rhetoric in teaching public writing, argued for the role of community literacy and community publishing work in fostering students’ public knowledge and agency, and theorized composition studies as a public. The past 20 years have also witnessed the development and increasing accessibility of new media genres, multimodal composing platforms, and digital networks that have expanded our students’ opportunities for composing and circulating public arguments. These developments have challenged scholars in public writing to explore the relationship between access and opportunity for public writing and the potential influence or public efficacy of students’ public writing. Both the expansion of opportunities for public writing and the development of public writing theory and pedagogy have served as catalysts for numerous writing programs across the country to “go public” by crafting public writing curricula and defining public writing as part of their outcomes.

To revisit the question “what do we want from public writing?” in our contemporary moment, authors are encouraged to engage and revisit the tensions and problems that have defined public writing pedagogy in composition, while also exploring and defining new areas of inquiry. Authors might pursue issues such as the following, though they should not feel limited by them:

emerging genres and mediums of public writing and their pedagogical applications.

materiality and public writing pedagogy, including investigations of material rhetoric in the public writing classroom and explorations of the relationship between materiality and the composition and circulation of public writing.

students’ prior knowledge of genres and mediums of public writing and the potentials and constraints of this knowledge for the public writing classroom.

spatial or place-based perspectives on public writing, including work that examines rhetorical ecologies of public writing

new approaches to service learning and community-based projects that foster students’ public writing and agency.

interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives applicable to public writing in composition, such as work in civic media, youth political participation, civic gaming, etc.

approaches to the problem of authenticity in public writing classrooms, including work that examines authentic public writing assignments.

work that expands our understanding of what counts as public participation in the public writing classroom, including explorations of participatory acts that often fall outside of the category of persuasion, such as sharing information across social networks.

approaches to assessing public writing and public writing programs.

public writing pedagogy that engages global contexts and exigencies.

theoretical and pedagogical approaches to multimodal public rhetoric.

approaches that revisit or explore public writing and theories of the public or publicity—public spheres, counter-publics, etc.

work that explores the intersections and divergences of public writing and civic education, particularly contemporary pedagogies such as “the new civics.”

analyses of initiatives to integrate public writing into community college and university writing programs.

approaches and possibilities for teaching public writing across the curriculum or in the disciplines.

teaching public writing in Basic Writing classrooms.

discussions of resistances—institutional, faculty, departmental, student—to public writing in composition.

Topics other than those listed above are enthusiastically encouraged, and articles on a broad range of issues and topics that fall within the broad project of public writing theory and pedagogy will be considered.

The guest editor also seeks two Program Profiles that focus on several important aspects of public writing programs, including, but not limited to, the following: the development and implementation of public writing courses and curricula, the role of community partnerships in public writing programs, the institutional perception and politics of public writing in specific universities or community colleges, and the role of writing program administration in advocating for public writing programs. Of particular interest are profiles that focus on the benefits and risks of integrating public writing into the curriculum at the level of writing programs. Interested contributors are invited to submit 300-500 word proposals to the guest editor, Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu), by September 15, 2016.